Why are you interested in working at RAND? Are you flexible about what you work on?
Operations Research Analyst Interview Questions
563 operations research analyst interview questions shared by candidates
Tell me about yourself, hobbies etc
How would you deal with missing data? And lots of competency questions
Phone (30 min): -What does the FDA do? -If you were in a high school play, what position are you? -Your boss emails you "There is a drug crisis in America"... how do you respond? What questions do you ask? What actions do you take? In-person (2.5 hr): -They asked me to prepare a 20 minute presentation on a project that I worked on. -During the application on USAJOBS, you had to fill out a questionnaire to determine if you qualified. I was asked about that questionnaire line by line. -You have a billion dollars. How do you make Excel better? -Greatest failure. -What sources do you use if you have questions? Which do you avoid?
Why do you think you are a fit for this position? and why FDA?
Why do you want to work here
Why do you leave your current job? What is your motivation in work? Tell me a situation you made a mistake and what do you learn from it?
They asked how I would deal with a situation where I believed the study lead of a project I was working on was making an incorrect decision.
Printing Neatly: Consider the problem of neatly printing a paragraph on a printer. The input text is a sequence of n words of lengths l1, l2, . . . , ln, measured in characters. We want to print this paragraph neatly on a number of lines that hold a maximum of M characters each. Our criterion of “neatness” is as follows. If a given line contains words i through j, where i ≤ j , and we leave exactly one space between words, the number of extra space characters at the end of the line is M-J+i- ∑_(k=i)^j▒l_k , which must be nonnegative so that the words fit on the line. We wish to minimize the sum, over all lines except the last, of the cubes of the numbers of extra space characters at the ends of lines. Give a dynamic-programming algorithm to print a paragraph of n words neatly on a printer. Analyze the running time and space requirements of your algorithm.
The paper tests are easy, need not much computation. The in-person questions are more practice-oriented and may require strong programming experience and skills.
Viewing 141 - 150 interview questions